Back to Africa Movement - Arkansas' Voyage to the Fatherland

“Our Exodus movement is the uprising of poor but industrious and religious people, who desire to cultivate the land in Liberia and do good to the natives, promoting peace and Christian civilization.”

- Martin R. Delaney, South Carolina, 1878

Black Americans began to return to their native land of Africa in 1820 – approximately 200 years after the transatlantic slave trade to Virginia began. Many of these brave souls were under the guidance of the American Colonization Society (A.C.S.), headquartered in Washington, D.C., and launched in 1816 by a group of white Americans. The organization arranged transportation and settlement for freed Blacks to make the voyage to Africa, specifically to the Republic of Liberia.

Liberia was a promise of land ownership and opportunity for freed Black people, which was not the promise of the South as a free Black human being. At the end of its seventy-eight years of operation, A.C.S. had aided 16,424 emigrants and 5,722 recaptured Africans to go back to Africa to reside in Liberia.

Arkansas’ portion of A.C.S.’s project began in 1877, subsided in 1882, but surged around the 1890s due to the racial violence and discrimination, low cotton prices, and sharecropping hardship – all backdrops for the first back-to-Africa expedition in America.

Approximately 13,000 free and redeemed slaves took advantage of the services that the American Colonization Society (A.C.S.) provided Black Americans. Many settled in Liberia before the Civil War, when discriminatory practices were not as prevalent. However, after the Reconstruction Era ended in 1877, life in America went from bad to worse for Black human beings, and a new, increased interest in African migration was created.

Black Arkansans regularly encountered racial discrimination at varying degrees and intensities as American history developed; however, those of the Mississippi Delta – more specifically, the Arkansas Delta – encountered greater. One of the more pressing racial matters in several counties of Arkansas’ Delta at the time was allowing Black people to vote. Phillips County was no exception to that. Although the county was predominantly Black – 75% Black to be exact – its white residents actively enforced discrimination against Black people.

The 1876 presidential election recorded a Republican majority in Phillips County; however, only 10 of 15,000 Black residents were allowed to vote. In the 1878 elections, white Democrats took dramatic measures to keep Black Arkansans from voting, including positioning a cannon in front of Phillips County’s primary polling place. Discriminatory occurrences and practices and the deteriorating status of Black Arkansans across Arkansas’ Delta motivated the development of the Back-to-Africa movement.

EXODUS

Arkansas’ exodus movement was the largest and strongest of all the Mississippi Delta’s counties through a formal organization of participants called the Liberian Exodus Arkansas Colony (L.E.A.C.). The organization held regular meetings, hiding its true intent from white neighbors. Its first convention was held in Helena of Phillips County on November 23, 1877, at the Third Baptist Church. People from Lee, St. Francis, Phillips, and Cross counties were in attendance, and they elected officers, formed a constitution, drew up a charter, and created over forty chapters.